Academic writing is a complex and often painful process, made more difficult by the alienating pressures placed on academics to publish. In this paper, we offer an analysis of this pain that is both phenomenological and realist. We draw on literatures from several disciplines and our own experiences as academic writers to identify seven 'pains',…

The aim of this article is to assist TESOL learners in effectively delving into professional literature for both their coursework and future teaching endeavors. It begins by addressing common challenges in critical reading faced by TESOL students, such as complex and technical language, varied writing styles and a lack of familiarity with TESOL…

This article presents a conceptual replication of Hashimoto and Egbert (https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12353), a study that featured multivariate models where lexical sophistication variables accounted for word difficulty (yes-no recognition) better than frequency alone among learners of English as a second or foreign language from North America.…

Supporting language in mathematics classrooms requires both curriculum material that follows language-responsive design principles and teaching practices that enact these principles with high instructional quality. This paper presents the analytic framework L-TRU, which was developed to assess language-responsive teaching practices quantitatively.…

According to the IELTS official website, IELTS candidates usually score lower in the IELTS Writing test than in the other language skills. This is disappointing for the many IELTS candidates who fail to get the overall band score they need. Surprisingly enough, few studies have addressed this issue. The present study, then, is aimed at shedding…

Current trends in educational research focus on understanding situational processes and the dynamics of achievement emotions. In this context, the features of the learning environment and their situational impact on achievement emotions play a significant role. In this study, we consider academic language demands as a feature of the learning…

The involvement load hypothesis (ILH), which predicts the lexical learning potential of tasks, assumes that writing sentences (SW) and compositions (CW) using novel target words (TWs) lead to similar lexical gains. However, research on the issue is scarce and contradictory. One possibility is that the higher cognitive load of CW hinders learning…

Over a century of research on postsecondary learning has documented that students often struggle with the academic literacy demands of college. Academic literacy tasks are the subset of all academic tasks that involve reading and writing and are rooted within larger cultural practices. These demands are challenging, complex, and varied, so…

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing has raised concerns regarding accuracy, ethics, and scientific rigour. Some AI content detectors may not accurately identify AI-generated texts, especially those that have undergone paraphrasing. Therefore, there is a pressing need for efficacious approaches or guidelines to…

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English…

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English-speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students' knowledge…

General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English-speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students' knowledge…

Writing different forms of text at different levels for responding satisfactorily to issues in the academic community is important. Thus, this paper examines the statistical differences between tertiary students' academic writing skills in different disciplines and at three different levels. We use a quantitative approach and descriptive design to…

In successful writing development, English as a foreign language (EFL) learners not only need to acquire grammatical complexity (GC) features but also know when and how to use them flexibly across communicative contexts, known as register flexibility. The present study, guided by the sociocultural theory of language learning, examines descriptive…

Background/purpose: This study examined Vietnamese English majors' competence and perception of academic collocations to determine the need for targeted instruction. The research aimed to identify specific challenges these learners face in learning and using academic collocations in their writing. Methods: The study involved 199 Vietnamese English…